Author: Synetech

I need a way to easily upload files to WordPress. Currently, whenever I want to upload a program to my website (e.g., to the Synetech sub-blog) to link to, I have to go through a frustrating process of using an FTP program to upload it to a secondary account, then using an SSH program to change the file’s owner to www-data, then move it to the web-server’s data directory. It’s a real pain, especially if I have to do it a few times.

Surely there’s an easier way, surely there must be a way to upload it directly to /var/www/html/... with the www-data owner tag set.

Why is it (in an evolutionary sense) that the palms of our hands and soles of our feet get sweaty when we are exposed to heights? This happens when we are actually in a position of being at altitude (e.g., on the edge of a roof, climbing a cliff, etc.), but also when we merely see photos or videos of others in such a position.

It makes no sense since having wet palms and feet makes it slippery and more likely to fall. This is a very counter-intuitive and backwards reaction. 🤨

Why would we evolve such a response?

I’m having a bafflingly difficult time trying to find a game. Around a decade ago (~2005~2010), there was a 2D platformer that involved a square maze and you had to rotate the world to alter gravity so that you could get to different areas. I recall there were colored (RGBY) keys and/or buttons to press to unlock doors.

If I recall correctly, the story was something like your sister is trapped in a dream and you need to rescue her from sleep (or maybe you play the sister and have to rescue a brother or something).

I thought it was Grief but it’s not that (it has a similar grayish pallet and some atmosphere like weather but Grief doesn’t involve rotating the world).

I’m fairly sure that the “world” is a cube that you can rotate, but you only play on one side at a time.

I’ve tried searching with numerous permutations of query terms, but have come up empty. 😕 Does anyone know what this game is called?

I’ve mocked up a screenshot:

When I was a small kid (~1983), my parents were running a Beckers convenience store and I remember one night, my mother took my sister and I there to pick up my sister’s father to go home. We hung around for a bit until his shift ended and he gave me a comic-book because it was missing the cover and so couldn’t be sold. It was my first and nearly only comic-book ever. I remember reading it on the way home or at home (though I don’t know if I was able to read at that point, so I might have just looked at it 🤔).

I recall the main character in the comic was some sort of large creature like a gargoyle, and a lot of the images of it were in silhouette. The only scene I remember well was of him sitting on a window-ledge of a building (which I suppose is appropriate for a gargoyle).

I tried looking it up, but the Disney show from 1994 queers the search. Even if I try to filter it out, the closest I can find is a character name (The) Gargoyle which is just a normal guy in a costume, but the one I remember was much larger and rounder and hunched, more like some depictions of Beast from X-Men.

Does anyone know what character that is?

This is my attempt to draw (in MSPaint) the scene of the gargoyle character sitting on the side of a building at night:

PWM is a way to fake an analog signal from a digital signal. Instead of outputting an analog signal in the middle of the range, the digital signal is turned on and off at rate that results in an average at the desired analog level (for example, rapidly turning a 5V signal on and off at equal intervals would result in a signal that appears to be 2.5V).

This is a convenient way to fake an analog signal without a real ADC but it has some disadvantages too. For one thing, it doesn’t always work and can cause anything from annoying flickering to outright not working as with some motors.

Bending a piece of metal, like a coat-hanger or soda-can–tab will eventually cause metal-fatigue and break it. Likewise, repeatedly heating and cooling an incandescent light-bulb will cause it to die sooner. Does rapidly turning some electronics components on and off, LEDs in particular, damage or break them or shorten their lifespan? 🤔

Something that has always baffled me about electricity is how electrons (or electron-holes/charge-carriers) know which branch in a circuit to go through.

At a low-level, we picture conductors like wires as being similar to tubes or pipes and electrons as water, or according to many diagrams, as little balls. Using various laws (e.g., Kirchhoff’s circuit law), we can calculate different electrical aspects such as voltage, current, resistance, etc. through the circuit, which tells us how much charge (and even how many electrons) flow through any part of the circuit, but that begs the question of how the electrons know which part of the circuit they need to go through.

For example, if there’s a junction in the circuit with a resistor one path and another resistor with a higher resistance on the other path, the one with the lower resistance will have more electrons flowing through it, but how do the electrons know which path they should go through before they go down a path?

In this case, it’s sort of easy to imagine that the higher resistance causes them to bunch up like a traffic-jam, which makes it harder for them to zip through, so more go through the other side, but this analogy doesn’t always work. The same question applies to other electrical properties and even more complex circuit schematics. For example, what about a circuit in which the aforementioned parallel resistors are followed in serial with the opposite resistor? The two paths are now equal in resistance, but he traffic-jam analogy doesn’t apply. How do the electrons still work out ahead of the first junction that which path to go down so that they’re all equal at the end?

I can’t help but think that the answer to this question is another example of the mess of the quantum world. That maybe it’s because the electrons exist at all points in the circuit and only manifest after reaching the goal, then the path to take goes back, something like the quantum-eraser. 🤔

Many years ago, I played a computer-game that I think was on a Commodore 64 (though I don’t see how that could have been possible since I don’t recall actually using a C64, and could swear I played it on my own computer, which would mean DOS 🤔). It was quite colorful (e.g., vibrant 16-color mode) and was a sci-fi platformer with grotesque H. R. Giger like mosnters and visual (think Alien).

I recall you played as a robot (more like the ED-209 from Robocop than Thexder), and there was a large metal pill (like the paddle in Alleyway. I also recall a large red monster face in the corner of the screen (possibly embedded into the floor or wall), facing up at a 45° angle.

I’m certain I managed to look it up several years ago, but I just can’t seem to find it now. I’ve tried various combinations of search queries, but Google Images doesn’t seem to find it. Whatever it is is reminiscent of Starquake. I feel like it was Turrican but a quick search indicates it is not (although it certainly does have some of the red tendrils that fit).

What game is it? 🤔

Many (many :-\) years ago, when I was little, my little sister and I spent the weekend in Toronto at her father’s place. I recall that the first night we were there, he had a bunch of people over for a sort of party or whatever, so my sister and I stayed in the bedroom and watched an animated movie. For decades now, I’ve been trying to figure out what movie it was. Here’s a list of everything I can remember about it:

• We watched the movie on broadcast (OTA) TV in about 1984-1988, so it must be from before then.
• It was similar to (but not) The Hobbit, a fantasy movie with fantasy creatures.
• It was similar to (but not) The Dark Crystal, again, fantasy creatures.
• It’s not Black Cauldron.
• It was animated (definitely cartoony).
• It had an overall yellow pallet for its color-scheme.
• There was a scene in which two of main characters (very much like hobbits) were standing on the top of a cliff and watching an army of bad creatures (which in my mind are like Skeksis), marching through a mountainous pass and trying to figure out what to do or talking about warning someone.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Does anybody have any idea what movie it was?

What is HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\KBDHID\Parameters\WorkNicely? What does this parameter control? Is it related to the user-generated BSOD/crash-control function?

There doesn’t seem to be any information about this on the Internet, the only search results that include it are of registry dumps of the key which of course say nothing about what it actually does.

It seems to default to 0 which from its name seems like the opposite of what would be desirable. My best guess is that instead of immediately performing a raw BSOD, it tries to avoid data-corruption by closing file and device handles before initiating the crash. 🤔

Many (many :-\) years ago, when I was young, I got a book (likely published in the 1980’s) from the children’s section of the public library that taught BASIC to kids. It was the first programming book I read, and only days after I started programming (which in turn was only hours after we got our first computer).

I distinctly remember it was not a textbook, but rather told a story of a person (the reader) who has to save princess Penelope and along the way encountered various friends (including a wizard), as well as obstacles and other stuff. The encounters involved writing a bit of code to display something on the screen (in graphics mode). I only recall the parts that drew things on screen, but I think there may have been other non-multimedia tasks like calculating stuff or whatever as well.

Some of the people and things that you encounter along the way included a pair of glasses (there was something special about them), a seagull, and a dinosaur, (and I think also a gun of some sort).

I’ve long since forgotten the title and every time I’ve tried searching for it, I’ve come up completely empty.

Does anyone know the book I’m talking about? Does anyone know what it was called or who wrote it?

(When I read that book back that, I had no idea how to pronounce her name and thought it was unusual, thinking it was /pen-e-lope/ the entire time. I had probably heard the name Penelope before, but I’d never seen it written down, nor seen the English spellings of Greek names to know of their use of long ‘e’ (e.g., Hercules). It wasn’t until years later when I saw the name Penelope written down somewhere that I suddenly flashed back to the book and realized that was her name.)